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From Vienna we took a holiday-within-a-holiday and spent a night in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, as Randi’s parents had enjoyed their visit earlier this year and it looked easy enough to get to. I didn’t really appreciate how easy it would be… the train from Vienna leaves every hour, takes an hour, and costs a mere €10.10 each way. Tickets can be purchased at any time from a mobile app, and of course there are no security queues or passport checks at any point. It does not surprise me to learn that commuting from Bratislava to Vienna is quite common. (I know that this is the normal train experience across Europe. It’s just so great.)

The train!

The centre of town was pedestrianised and lovely

You can’t visit any city (except Toledo, Ohio) without taking a walking tour, so we wrapped up warm for a chilly three-hour history of the Communist era with our guide and two guys from Singapore. (“What is the weather like in Singapore?” “It’s always nice.” “What about in winter?” “There is no winter.”) Despite the cold it was a really interesting walk, including the views of Austria and Hungary from Bratislava Castle. It does seem that every postwar government was prone to inappropriate road-building schemes, whatever their ideology. At least Bratislava got a UFO-shaped restaurant perched on top of a bridge in return, although the authorities had to put up blinds on one side to block out the views of capitalist Austria during the Cold War.

Be wary of the trams sneaking up on you

The castle!

At night we enjoyed the spectacular Christmas market in the centre of town, which was even better (and less crowded) than Vienna’s. The most common food was lokša (known via Catherine as lefse) of which I particularly enjoyed the blue cheese and chocolate options. Meanwhile, Randi was thrilled to discover that the ‘meat and cabbage soup’ meal handed down through her family existed here as kapustnica.

I highly recommend a visit to Bratislava!

Christmas market in Bratislava

Market food

With this cheerful fellow

Randi and I spent the week before Christmas in Vienna, which neither of us had been to before and seemed like a suitably Christmassy place. Since there is an awful lot to do in the city we decided to buy a 6-day Vienna Pass at the outset, which lets you into almost anything and makes it feel acceptable to swan into the Belvedere or Schönbrunn Zoo for half an hour.  And with that, we were away!

Christmas in Vienna

Randi discovers lángos

On our first night we headed straight for the biggest Christmas market where Randi discovered the goodness of lángos (deep fried dough with garlic butter) and I was delighted to find a stall where I could load up a kartoffel with mais and schinken. (Why has America never embraced the jacket potato as a fast food option? It’s inexplicable.) And on the topic of food innovation, it is worth highlighting how Austrians make hot dogs. Rather than sliding it into the side of a bun, they take a baguette and impale it on a heafty spike before entombing the sausage neatly within and adding sauces. It is such a superior hot dogging system that I have opened my eyes to the inferiority of the English-speaking world on this point.

At the Christmas market with City Hall in the background

St. Stephen’s Cathedral

Vienna has museums for everything. We visited Mozart’s house – with a strikingly sad reminder that even a rich and successful man could lose four of his six children in infancy – and Freud’s home and office before he was forced to emigrate to London by the Nazis. (This is a much more sympathetic angle to view Freud from rather than as the father of psychoanalysis.)

We also saw one of the two Jewish museums, toured the famous Royal Opera House and watched the white Lipizzan horses of the Spanish Riding School do their morning exercises. To be honest, their morning exercises are not especially athletic, although they do seem to involve some diagonal trotting. The Schönbrunn Palace is amazing and well worth a visit, although by that point we were tired of audio guides and just wandered through the rooms making up their likely purposes.

We’re in the Opera House!

Schnitzel! I ate so much schnitzel…

Everyone we met was very friendly and (of course) could switch seamlessly into English mid-sentence after seeing our gormless faces. And I don’t just mean waiters in restaurants, I mean ‘the woman in the lift at our AirBnB apartment block’ or ‘random teenagers on the train’. However, I do also want to salute a few amusing moments of customer service, which is what you expect from a German-speaking country which doesn’t withhold people’s income in expectation of tips. For example, the guy at tourist information at the airport was full of disdain when I asked for a 6-day Vienna card rather than a 6-day Vienna pass. “There is no 6-day Vienna card!” he said, as if I had failed a test.

Props also to the guy who suddenly stepped out and took my photo on the way up to the Donauturm without thinking to let me know what was about to happen. I didn’t buy it, so unfortunately you will have to imagine my surprised expression.

Drinks in the Imperial Hotel

Trying to recreate the scene from The Third Man on the Riesenrad without being able to remember what it looked like

Public transport is obviously fantastic

In the beautiful State Hall at the National Library

One highlight of the trip was seeing a concert at the Musikverein. We saw the Artis-Quartet perform pieces by Mozart, Einem and Bruckner, during which everyone in the audience mysteriously knew when each piece was actually over (and it was OK to clap) and when they were just taking a little break (when it was clearly not OK to clap). The venue also nearly defeated us with its seating plan before the concert had even started, as they divide each row into ‘left’ and ‘right’ sections, meaning that two ‘number 11’ chairs sit side-by-side in the middle of every aisle. If you don’t know this in advance, it can lead to some awkward interactions when you find people in ‘your’ seats. (Turns out we were in the wrong hall anyway. You can tell we were tourists.)

Christmas trees all over town

Roll your eyes all you want, however, because one of my favourite outings was our tour of the Austrian parliament. Parliament Building is a grand and impressive place, though we discovered it’s also a place which is closed for three years for refurbishment and fire safety upgrades. But never mind about the building, because Austrian politics itself is at a moment of tension right now. Our walking tour on Monday was re-routed to avoid the protests against the swearing-in of their unpleasant new government: a coalition of the right and far-right which does not bode well for the general European trend. (We actually only saw a dozen people ‘protesting’ by riding their bikes slowly through the city centre and playing some music, but were assured that others were around.) With all of this in mind, it was cool not just to be able to see the temporary parliament but even sit in the chairs in the National Assembly. They never let you do this at Westminster.

I made sure I was sitting in the Social Democrat side

Thanks to Amanda for her suggestions for things to do in the city, including eating Sachertorte in Café Sperl, which we did after working up an appetite by wandering through Stadtpark and Naschmarkt. I was also planning to include our side-quest to Bratislava in this post, but seeing at the length already I will save that for another post. To be continued…

Schönbrunn Palace Gardens

Back in January, I was having lunch with Ellen at work and explained my Iceland dilemma: my family had snagged a package deal for a long Easter weekend trip, and I was deciding whether to join them. Her “you’re an idiot, why is this even a question?” face was telling, so I did. Great decision.

Welcome to Reykjavik

I arrived on Saturday morning, joining Randi in our AirBnB after she had already spent a couple of days touring, riding horses and befriending our host’s cat. (Once again, my heart beats for AirBnB and the quirky, joyful extra dimension it adds to travelling.) Notwithstanding my foolish lack of sleep on the overnight flight, we set off on a two hour walking tour of Reykjavik with a great guide who came armed with a fiercely dry sense of humour.

Now Reykjavik is not a big place, and strictly speaking, you don’t really need two hours to walk around it and take in the sights. Indeed, the recent tourism boom seems to have taken Iceland a little by surprise, and so to fill the void of major sightseeing spots our guide turned to such topics as the country’s school system, tax rates and parental leave policies. Don’t get me wrong, these things were right up my street, but given the wind I would have appreciated it just as much indoors.

After meeting up with my family, we headed to one of Reykjavik’s many outdoor public pools for an authentic Icelandic bathe. (Not to mention an authentic Icelandic forced naked shower beforehand: this is not the Anglo-American way.) I loved these baths, and wish very hard that some geothermal heating might hit Chicago in the near future.

Finally, that night we headed out on a coach trip hunting the Northern Lights, which were soon located! We soon discovered that fancy cameras are much better at capturing their colours than feeble human eyes: I saw mostly white shimmers across the sky, but will allow photographs to falsify my memory after the fact.

Northern Lights

Misbehaving on the coach

Sunday was our big Golden Circle excursion day, and our guide Siggi drove us around in a monster jeep which – as he cheerfully informed us – was the product of a Frankenstein melding of two smaller vehicles. But it proved more than capable of bouncing through the snow and ice while we visited the Gullfoss waterfall, exploding geysers, a field of super-friendly horses and the border between the American and Eurasian continental plates. But the absolute highlight of the trip was the snowmobiling session! After first letting Katie prove out the theory that you don’t actually need to know how to drive a car in order to master a snowmobile, Randi promoted me from passenger to driver on ours, and I’m pleased to report that no injuries were sustained.

Casual family gathering

Can’t drive a car; can totally drive a snowmobile

Remember the SkiFree monster? Here it is.

We decided to wait downstream of the exploding geyser

Katie summons the horses

After a French farewell dinner with the family on Sunday night, Randi and I tried out another public pool on Monday morning and took a final walk by the ocean before heading home. There’s a definite atmosphere of quiet, Nordic utilitarianism to the city, and walking around made me think sympathetically on Hillary Clinton’s famous “we’re not Denmark” line. Not that we don’t have much to learn from Denmark, or Iceland, but you can’t just transplant a culture from an island of 320,000 people and hope that it sticks.

Still, this was definitely an Easter weekend to remember, and served up some unforgettable landscapes. Come join the Icelandic tourist boom now before they get fed up of us all invading their country!

The Sun Voyager

For the past two weeks I’ve been travelling again for work. Back to Warsaw first, and this time joined by Bex who very graciously endured my abridged, second-hand re-enactment of an Old Town walking tour. It was also great to see Mark and Caroline again, and along with a couple of others we visited what I can only assume is one of the city’s premier gambling establishments. Alas it still failed to arouse my interest in actually gambling (no surprise there) and so instead I amused the Italians by ordering tea (with milk) at the bar. I was desperate.

Bex, Sara, Rossella and me

Caroline, Mark and Rossella in a Warsaw casino

After a couple of hours wandering around Brussels on a layover, my next stop was Morocco. Having been advised that Marrakesh would be a more interesting place to spend a weekend than Casablanca, I started there.

Inside the Majorelle Garden

I was excited – this was actually my first visit to any African country whatsoever, let alone Morocco – and spent Sunday exploring the city. (Yes, I know I’m wearing a super-touristy hat: it’s only because I needed to get some change for entry into the Saadian Tombs.) The central square, Jemaa el-Fnaa, is breathtaking and the souks alongside are fun to explore, just as long as you watch out for the motorbikes which some people see fit to ride through the packed, narrow paths.

I’m also very glad I visited the Majorelle Garden – it’s a small, enclosed space but is astonishingly colourful and peaceful inside. The perfect calming antidote to a bustling market, and the last thing I saw before catching my train to Casablanca. (A three hour ride, in wonderful old-fashioned compartment style for about $14. The rest of the world should take note.) I’m pretty sure the two Spanish men to my right were complaining about the English, though.

Jemaa el-Fnaa

In the souk

Looking out over lunch

Catching the train to Casablanca

I should mention that Morocco is very much an Arabic and French speaking country, and the limitations of my English-only tongue were particularly evident in the taxi journey from Casablanca’s main railway station to my hotel. I was somewhat confused when another passenger joined us – this turns out to be a normal and, I guess, somewhat economic quirk of their taxi system – and then the driver grew increasingly impatient with my inability to answer any of his questions. Thankfully, the atmosphere lightened when he stopped the car in order to hide away some cash in a secret cubby hole hidden in the middle of the steering wheel, and we both started laughing together. You don’t really need to share a language to bond. A shared love of the absurd will do.

With Francisco

I didn’t get a chance for much touristy stuff in Casablanca, although I was well taken care of by Francisco and Jessica while I was there, and enjoyed hanging out with other visitors from the French office. We did make it to the world’s third-largest mosque one night, right by the sea, which was beautiful.

The Atomium at night

But soon it was time to go home, and fortunately this time the mysterious gods of yield-management airline pricing granted me an overnight stay in Brussels. So as a lovely bonus to the whole trip, my parents popped in by train so we could have dinner together and see the city sights by night.

So now, in terms of tourist sightseeing, I can tick off the Grand Place, the Mannequin-Pis (or the “peeing boy statue” as everyone actually says) and the Atomium. We worried the latter would be a wasted cab ride – with nothing to see in the dark – but were pleased to discover that at night it lights up and sparkles more than a Twilight vampire.

Oh, and in the midst of all of this, I also scored theatre tickets to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an intense online booking queue. But that is a story for next year…

Dinner in Brussels

At the Manneken-Pis

Have you ever arrived at a party and realised that no one you know has arrived yet? But there’s a free bar, so you grab a drink and mingle?

Lesson learned: the mingling bit is significantly harder when you’re in Poland, and everybody else is speaking Polish.

Nevertheless, I had a great and productive two weeks in Warsaw. As most people know, the city was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, but the modern replacement which rose from the ruins is a lot more attractive than the Soviet brutalism you might imagine. Meanwhile, Old Town is quite astonishing as a monument to rebirth and reconstruction.

A baseball player (don’t ask) in Warsaw’s Old Town

Monument to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944

Another reminder of the uprising

MARIE CURIE WAS POLISH

Not sure what this was doing in the middle of Warsaw, but I like it

Only 1444 km away!

Other highlights included ordering French food with Steven (with a horrified “that’s not French…” reaction when it arrived), museums to the Warsaw Uprising and Jewish History, and my artificially-engineered multi-stop journey home on the last night just so that I could try the underground system. (Clean, bright and purple, with trains arriving every few minutes, if you were wondering.) I also enjoyed a walking tour which ended in free vodka shots – and very refreshingly cold they were too!

As a wonderful bonus, Katie and I also spent one of the weekends in Prague. Everybody always says Prague is beautiful, and it didn’t disappoint. After taking an overnight sleeper train – which I will always find inherently joyful and thrilling, especially when there’s no messing about with passports or border controls – we took a walking tour to take in all the main sights. And man, this walking tour was good. Our guide, Karel, was engaging and charismatic, and a perfect introduction to the city. (A city no less charming for the fact that beer is literally cheaper than bottled water.)

Is there anything cooler than a transnational sleeper train?

Welcome to Prague

Not pictured: Weeping Angels descending from Prague Castle to kill us

Scenes of death made us awkward

After a ‘Premium Economy’ upgraded flight back (oh ye gods of yield management pricing), I arrived back in Chicago in time for another Groupon Summer StreetFest. And a heatwave. As April and I laboured over a game of giant Jenga, it felt more like a military exercise…